23 May 2024

Working alongside people with lived experience - known as Experts by Experience, has always been a priority for the KHP Mind & Body team.  

Through the Mind & Body Integrating Mental and Physical Healthcare Systems Project (IMPHS), the project team learned how to effectively work together with Experts by Experience. Together with their Experts they developed a toolkit to help other healthcare project teams looking to work in collaboration with Experts by Experience.

What is an Expert by Experience?  

The KHP Mind & Body programme definition for an Expert by Experience is someone who shares knowledge based on their experiences. There are many ways in which Experts by Experience can contribute to healthcare projects, for example they can support the evaluation of new healthcare services or make suggestions for service improvements.  

The IMPHS project team said  

Having Experts by Experience can help to more effectively shape projects and by prioritising meaningful involvement, project teams can ensure their work more positively impacts on the services and people for whom they are intended to benefit.

Creating the Expert by Experience toolkit  

Through working with Experts by Experience the IMPHS project the team learned about effective involvement and engagement practices. By adapting their approach throughout the project, they found new ways of making their involvement and engagement activities a success. What they learned benefitted their project in several ways:  

  • They created psychologically safe spaces for people to share their feedback which helped to improve the accuracy of their results.  
  • They amplified the voices of people with lived experience who were inspired to share learnings from the project within their own networks.  
  • They prioritised inclusion so more people had the opportunity to be involved, as a result they were able to gather more insights and identify problems and opportunities that may otherwise have been missed.  

The team produced a toolkit to share what they had learned about effective involvement and engagement, to help guide other healthcare project teams through the process. The toolkit means to make involvement meaningful so future healthcare projects can have a better chance of making a positive impact.  

The IMPHS project team said there is not a one-size-fits-all approach to working with Experts by Experience but their toolkit outlines principles other teams can use as a guide and adapt if they need to.   

What's inside the toolkit? 

The toolkit was created in collaboration with Experts by Experience. It contains reflections from the project team and the Experts by Experience, and it expands on the four principles of Expert by Experience involvement and engagement.  

Katherin Barrett, IMPHS Expert by Experience said:  

It was important to include service users in the development of the toolkit because we have a different perspective to the professionals.

The four principles of the toolkit 

  • Principle one – Embedding the voice of lived experience into everything you do. 
  • Principle two – Promoting an inclusive and collaborative approach to working with your experts.  
  • Principle three – Prioritising psychological safety and ways to engage meaningfully with your experts. 
  • Principle four – Championing for experts to share their experiences beyond the project.  

The toolkit can be accessed through the Mind & Body Improvement Network page. To download the toolkit, become a member of the Mind & Body Improvement Network.  

The Improvement Network is open to all existing Mind & Body Champions as well as anyone who works in mental or physical healthcare. It is a means for healthcare professionals to collaborate, innovate and deliver integrated mental and physical healthcare across King's Health Partners and beyond. 

This work has been delivered by former IMPHS colleagues and Experts by Experience under the Mind & Body Programme at King's Health Partners and funded as part of the project legacy by the Maudsley Charity.